[256-261] It would now be necessary to clarify what relations constitute the psychological world, and how they differ from the relations that make up the rest of nature and experience. On this subject, the Viennese physicist Mach has perhaps given the clearest indications*. In any given experience, what is given depends on a multitude of relations which, first of all, are divided into two groups: those that are identically verified by all organisms externally analogous to ours, that is, by all witnesses; and those that vary depending on the witness. Psychology has as its subject all these latter relations, and their totality constitutes what we call psychological activity. To be more precise—the first do not depend on our organism and biological activity. The second depend on them intimately and inevitably...

Mathematics, mechanics, physics, chemistry, biology—all these are sciences, each of which isolates a group of relations from the totality of relations contained in the given, and which are independent and must be considered independently of our organization. These are objective relations, the subject matter of natural science, whose ideal is the exclusion from the given of all relations that make this given dependent on our organism...

Experience shows us the mutual influence of the biological and the psychological, a system of relations between them. Why not consider each of these two orders of facts as two orders of natural facts, which act upon and respond to one another, like all other orders of natural facts: thermal, electrical, optical, chemical phenomena, and so forth? Between all these orders there is no more and no less difference than between the biological order and the psychological order. All phenomena must be considered in one and the same plane and must be regarded as capable of conditioning one another.

* Annee psychologique 1906, XII-e annee. (Paris, Schleicher.)


Undoubtedly, against this conception one will raise the objection that it does not explain why there is experience and the organism's knowledge of this experience. But does it not seem that one could and indeed should respond that this question, like all metaphysical questions, is a poorly posed, non-existent question? It proceeds from an anthropomorphic illusion, forever contrasting spirit with the universe. One cannot ask why there is experience, for experience is a fact and imposes itself as such...

Experience, or, taking a less ambiguous term, the given, has until now seemed to us dependent on mathematical, mechanical, physical, and other relations. When we analyze these conditions, it seems to us, moreover, to depend on certain relations about which, in general, it can be said that they distort it, depending on the individual to whom it is given: these distortions constitute the subjective, the psychological. Can we establish—of course, still very roughly and from a distance—the general meaning of these new relations, these distortions, that is, the direction in which scientific analysis, progressing over centuries, dares to discover the most general principles implied by them?

Why, in other words, is the given, instead of being identical for all individuals; instead of being immediately given, constituting only one whole with the knowledge one has of it, subjectively distorted? Distorted to such a degree that a considerable number of philosophers and common sense have gone so far as to break the unity of experience and advance an insurmountable dualism of things and spirit, which is nothing other than a dualism of experience as it is had by all, insofar as sciences correct it, and experience as it is distorted in particular consciousness...

[271-272] Images are not identical with sensations, as subjectivism asserted, if one gives this word—ambiguous in the breadth of its meaning—the sense of immediate lived experiences. On this point, Bergson's analysis was far from unfruitful. The image is the result of certain relations already contained in immediate experience, that is, in sensation. But this latter contains many others besides. Let there be given only the relations constituting the system of the "image" (a partial system, if compared with the entire system of sensation and

"experience is
a fact"

experience of
socially-organized
individuals

